Talent Emergence
Recent theorizing explores how human resource management practices can create competitive advantage and facilitate organizational performance.1 This perspective suggests that retaining the talents (i.e., knowledge, skills, abilities, experiences, relationships, attitudes, and motivations) associated with individuals within the organization can lead to the emergence of organization level talent that creates a competitive advantage and can lead to improved organizational performance.
Retaining high quality and emergent talent has been an important concern for leaders in all types of organizations for a long time. We believe that talent management is becoming more important than ever, and that many managers and organizations can benefit from taking an evidence-based perspective to retaining talent. The importance of holding on to valuable employees is increasing for several reasons that we have discussed. Demographic and labor market trends suggest the possibility of shortages of appropriately skilled and educated labor. The nature of work is changing so that employee skill sets can be treated less and less as interchangeable parts and instead performance depends more and more on the unique knowledge, skills, abilities, experiences, relationships, attitudes, and motivations each individual contributes to the workplace. The challenging labor market and organizational efforts to do more with less have built substantial pent-up turnover at risk to leave as soon as opportunities become more plentiful. These trends point to the importance of considering talent emergence.
However, in order for talent to emerge as a source of sustainable competitive advantage, the human resource practices themselves have to add value and the system of practices needs to be appropriate for the context, synergistic, and difficult for competitors to imitate. Our purpose with this book was to provide a foundation for talent emergence based on developing a strategic approach to retention by dispelling common misperceptions about why people leave organizations and replacing them with evidence-based strategies backed by solid theory, research, and peer review. Hopefully, readers are now better prepared to:
•assess the real impact of turnover in their organizations;
•understand what really drives turnover decisions and what leads employees to stay;
•collect and analyze turnover-relevant data and interpret the result through the lens of organizational context; and
•implement retention tools for improved recruitment, selection, on-boarding, training and development, rewards, leadership, and engagement.